Dyes, Fertilizers and the Chemical Industry

Chemistry became a major industry in the Second Industrial Revolution. In 1856, 18-year-old William Perkin, trying to make the antimalarial drug quinine from coal tar, accidentally produced mauveine, the first synthetic dye, sparking a craze for purple fabrics. Although the discovery was British, German companies such as BASF, Bayer and Hoechst, founded in the 1860s, came to dominate synthetic dyes by investing heavily in university-trained chemists and research laboratories.

They expanded into medicines, including Bayer's aspirin in 1899. In 1909 Fritz Haber showed how to make ammonia from nitrogen in the air, and Carl Bosch scaled the process up for BASF by 1913, making synthetic fertilizers possible. The Haber-Bosch process has helped feed billions of people, but it was also used to make explosives in World War I, showing how one discovery can have very different uses.